Convict B14
A Novel
9781465629050
211 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
At the entrance of a green valley, where the Easedale beck came down from Easedale Tarn, scattering its silver tresses loose over the rocks at Sour Milk Gill, and hurrying to join the Rotha at Goody Bridge, stood a wayside hostelry: a spruce gray villa, overflowing with flowers under white and green sun-blinds and a glass piazza. Not by any means a grand place, but attractive; the hesitating traveler might guess that the comforts inside would answer to the trimness outside, nor would he be wrong. Within its limits, the Easedale Hotel was that rarity, a thoroughly well-run English inn. The proprietor of the place and only begetter of its prosperity was reposing on the veranda in an easy attitude, with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the Grasmere road. Spidering, he called it; which meant that he was looking out for possible guests. He liked to make a play of his work. Harry Gardiner, the son of a country parson, was a slight young man of middle height, and very brown—olive-brown, sun-brown. He did not look wholly English; a quarter part of Spanish blood ran in his veins. He had dark eyes and a small head, small hands and wiry muscles, small features and a thin mouth. He was quick in all he thought and said and did, shrewd at a bargain, fond of money, but fonder still of liberty. After being pitchforked by circumstances into his odd trade, he had stuck to it for love and made it pay; he had already progressed from a humble fonda in the Canaries to a boarding-house in Sydney, and from the boarding-house to the Easedale Hotel. But he was a rolling stone, and would never stay long enough in any one place to reap the full fruit of his toil. He turned at the sound of a step behind him, and his eyes laughed. "Hullo, Denis! Got into all your glad rags? You'll scare my people—they aren't used to such visions." "You'd not have me sit down to dinner without washin' my hands, would you?" inquired the new-comer in a voice which his best efforts could never rid of a trace of soft Irish brogue. He was wearing ordinary evening clothes, not very new, but in some subtle way he did contrive to give the impression of being point device in every detail. Denis Merion-Smith was partner in an aeroplane firm; but he had once been in the Royal Engineers, and though it was years since he had resigned his commission, he still carried his handsome nose in the air and looked down on inferior mortals through a single eyeglass. Gardiner laughed. "Why not? My crowd mostly do. But we're going up in the social scale. I began with travelers, I went on to artists, I've attained the Church, and I live in hopes of even rising to the army some day. You didn't happen to look into the dining-room on your way down?"
